10.22.2008 / EP. 49
Model Soldier
Carrie strolled along the canal in despondent humour. She giggled periodically. A couple of muggers approached, weighing the opportunity to exercise their art. Carrie considered the odds. She slowly raised one high heel onto a bench. Her skirt slid up. “I’m lucky tonight,” a mugger said.
“You’re lucky?” called the second. “He is indeed,” shouted an onlooker.
“No, she is,” rejoined the first. “It’s too cold,” the second murmured bitterly.
I, you, he-she-it, we: Carrie’s encounter was modeled after verbal conjugation. She verged on hysterics and therefore, by the inapposite, ineluctable rules of her grammar, she appeared morose. From her thigh level skirts, she drew a pistol and fired a round at each mugger, trying hard to miss. She barely succeeding. “You’re idiots,” she muttered. The onlooker stared. “They really are,” added Carrie. She felt tears well up. The muggers ran. “I’m out of here, and you’re crazy,” called the onlooker. A matronly figure shook her head. She’d caught only scraps of the conversation and her fluffy dog needed walking. She hadn’t seen the shooting. Carrie responded by turning one side of her mouth up and the other down. “I hate to miss,” she commented conversationally. “Don’t you?” The woman told her dog that the world was nuts.
Carrie resumed her walk. The interaction was over. The soundproof glass that isolated her from the world had slipped into place again. She seemed deaf, across a grand canyon that separated persons and minds. No one understood her and it had always been like this. Friends thought she liked boys she despised and avoided food she craved, if ever she’d had friends. There was her brother, fleeting hopes on moonlight nights in Kansas, and Billy, but with these exceptions her vicinity was a place where opposites thrived and misreadings flourished and mistakes covered the ground like moss in damp shade.
Carrie grew into a morose adolescent. RED was the tactful excuse if not cause of her loneliness. She couldn’t say in fact which it was. The world thought she was shy, and Carrie leapt at the alternative over broody or ill-tempered. Who wouldn’t? But the gap remained. Carrie walked up life’s hillside on a path that others couldn’t see. The smartest friends, the dullest intellects, all reacted appropriately when others spoke or took a step. This had nothing to do with mind. It came from belonging. Carrie wasn’t part of the club. When Josie in grade 6 tripped and broke her arm, Carrie felt sorrow but smiled. Not an ounce of joy in Carrie, but her eyes twinkled. A moment later, her brow furrowed in concentration, she displayed a glimmer of enlightenment and relief, then guilt, then calm, then self-satisfaction. Emotional ripples succeeded one another like waves on a beach. And none resembled the opaque bafflement that all the other girls showed, the patient, predictable, smoldering disdain of prepubescent girls waiting for an adult to take charge and impose order on the world, disdain that bordered on tears.
If anything made Carrie successful as a soldier, it was that she never waited for anyone else to impose order. She did it herself. And her reactions never followed the example of others. RED meant that Carrie sailed her ship by her own maps and compass. If she responded to an injury or disaster like other people, nobody would know it because they couldn’t read Carrie’s inner self from her external markers. The face didn’t reflect the coinage within. And Carrie was sublimely jealous of Milly and Pam, who – in Carrie’s overheated imagination – possessed every redeeming social trait she did not.
